Off-site Archive

  January 26, 2018 REAL CONVERSATIONS ABOUT WORKER'S COMPENSATION - FLORIDA STYLE By Judge David Langham I participated this week in Real Conversations about Worker's Compensation (RCWC), part of a two-day seminar produced by WorkCompCentral (WCC) in Saint Pete Beach. It was the first WCC program in Florida, and is noteworthy for that reason alone. However, the program was itself noteworthy.  The RCWC format is scripted around hypothetical scenarios, primarily arising from situations in California. They are exaggerated for discussion’s sake. The discussion uses their foundational facts to highlight broad and interesting issues by a very large panel of ten subject-matter experts. And, within this construct, there is discussion of ethical and professional issues.  We discussed compensability of closed-head trauma symptomatology. This is a California hot-topic. With a newly diagnosed but long retired claimant there are issues. There was discussion of whether a Florida petiti...

  January 12, 2018 WHAT IS THE POINT? By Judge David Langham What is the point? What is the purpose of workers’ compensation? I was confounded by that question recently in an exchange of emails with a judge from another jurisdiction. The foundation arises from this judge’s perceptions of employer-selected medical care; there is some apparent tendency to find that concept difficult to comprehend. In Florida, for the most part, medical care providers in workers’ compensation are selected by the employer (or carrier).  The judge with whom I was corresponding works in a state in which the insurance companies each have a “medical provider network” or “MPN.” In this manner, the carrier controls the population of “available” physicians, but the injured worker may choose from among those in the MPN (Florida unsuccessfully tried something similar called “managed care” in the 1990s). A third alternative also exists in some jurisdictions where the injured worker has virtually unfettere...